Farrell, Hazen hope lessons learned in Cleveland serve them well in Boston

Seven or eight years ago, when John Farrell and Mike Hazen had a moment free while running the Cleveland Indians’ minor-league system, the two took a step back to admire the structural system around them.

Seven or eight years ago, when John Farrell and Mike Hazen had a moment free while running the Cleveland Indians’ minor-league system, the two took a step back to admire the structural system around them.

The system had been installed by executives John Hart, Mark Shapiro and Chris Antonetti before Farrell or Hazen were hired. What struck Farrell and Hazen — then the Indians’ farm director and assistant farm director, respectively — was that the Indians’ organization didn’t just look like a baseball organization; it looked the way any other smoothly running corporation might look.

“The process that was created there with Mark and Chris leading it, you could have applied that to any number of industries,” said Farrell, who was hired last month to succeed Bobby Valentine as Red Sox manager. “You could take that same setup — with how thorough things were and how challenging it was for everyone involved — and apply that to other areas and it might be successful, even if it wasn’t baseball.”

The Cleveland organizational structure worked very efficiently in those days. Baseball America judged the Indians as having the best farm system in the game in 2003 — a farm system that then featured Travis Hafner, Cliff Lee and Victor Martinez. The Indians won 93 games in 2005 and 96 games in 2007, a season in which they got within one game of the World Series.

And, almost a decade later, a look at the recently revamped Red Sox masthead reveals a distinct Cuyahoga County flavor.

Farrell spent five seasons as the Cleveland director of player development before departing to become the Boston pitching coach under Terry Francona.

Hazen spent five seasons in the Cleveland front office, including two alongside Farrell at the helm of the Indians’ farm system. He’s now an assistant general manager in the Boston front office, one of the top lieutenants of Ben Cherington.

Torey Lovullo spent eight seasons as a manager of various Cleveland farm teams from Single-A to Triple-A, working under Farrell for five of those seasons. He spent two seasons on the staff Farrell managed in Toronto before joining Farrell in Boston as his bench coach.

All can point to their experiences working for and with Shapiro and Antonetti in Cleveland as what launched them on their impressive career trajectories.

Even Cherington spent his first season in a baseball front office working for the Indians, a year he compared to obtaining a second master’s degree.

“When I left to go to Boston, there were some things we tried to take from there — whether that’s in player development or other areas — and we’re not the only ones to do that,” Cherington said. “There have been other teams trying to copy some of what has gone on in Cleveland for a long time. More and more organizations now look more like Cleveland did 15 years ago.”

The Cleveland model might not be the be-all and end-all. That the Indians have failed to win more than 81 games in the last five seasons speaks to that.

But because so many members of the Red Sox hierarchy came from the same organizational structure — and all have such a familiarity with one another — everything they do figures to be more productive.

Farrell and Lovullo don’t have to worry about getting to know Cherington and Hazen and their operating philosophies. They can hit the ground running.

“It does help when you don’t hold back,” Hazen said. “Both times can be at fault for that sometimes. You cannot say everything that you’re thinking — or maybe you’re being ultra-respectful of the other person. That doesn’t happen now. People say what they think.”

“It has an uncanny resemblance to eight years ago,” Lovullo said.

No one involved was interested in making a direct comparison to the tenure of Bobby Valentine, a managerial era marked by acrimony everywhere. Valentine was open about the fact that he and his staff never saw eye to eye. It never sounded like his dealings with the front office were much smoother, either.

The juxtaposition speaks for itself, however. As Farrell has begun work, he has done so alongside a group of executives with whom he has a profound understanding — an understanding that began almost a decade ago on the shores of Lake Erie.

“If it’s talking about an individual player, it’s the inclusion of a group of people to give their input who don’t feel inhibited or restricted from speaking in a genuine way to give their honest opinion,” Farrell said. “There’s not the following of the herd. There’s challenging one another across a conversation because you might have a different viewpoint or see something differently about a given player.”

When Hazen and Lovullo look back at their respective tenures in Cleveland, they credit Farrell for the creation of an atmosphere for productivity.

“He was my boss, but he let me do things right away,” Hazen said. “He said, ‘You do this. You do that.’ He let me do it. He empowered me to do a lot of stuff, even at that level when I didn’t have a lot of experience doing what I was doing. He was very supportive and encouraging — and always positive.”

“He let people work in their environment,” Lovullo said. “He didn’t have the iron handcuffs to do it a certain way. He let people express themselves through some of their strengths. He was able to identify limitations and address those limitations in a really good, positive way.”

But Farrell joined the Indians as a former major-league pitcher whose only off-the-field experience was as an assistant coach and recruiting coordinator at Oklahoma State. Looking back now, he isn’t sure he knew what he was doing. All he’ll say he did was adopt the attitude already in place around him.

No idea was more valid than another simply because it came from someone with a larger paycheck. Everyone had a voice. Everyone also, however, was challenged to contribute ideas that could hold up against the scrutiny of others in something resembling cross-examination.

“The environment we worked in, it was a flat environment,” Farrell said. “It wasn’t a vertical one to where people felt they couldn’t say anything because their ranks were below another person. By being on the same plane, regardless of how many years you had in a given position or who you were working with, there was always that freedom to speak your mind.”

Shortly before the end of spring training one year, a 26- or 27-year-old Hazen — working under Farrell as assistant director of player development — saw something he didn’t like with the way Cleveland’s minor-league coaching staffs were going about their business. It was a little lax. It was a little, the way Lovullo described it, “loose and careless.”

“Mike saw that and he explained it to John, and John was able to pick up on that and identify that he was seeing that as well,” Lovullo said. “The next day, together, they came in and straightened everything out for us and gave us a pretty good, pretty aggressive sit-down talk.”

What impressed Lovullo was that Hazen had the ability to perceive a problem and to correct it.

What impressed Hazen was that Farrell was so willing to hear and act upon his contribution.

To Farrell, however, that was the way the whole system was supposed to operate.

“Mike’s ability to read a situation and not be inhibited to give a recommendation, hell, that’s what made it work so well,” Farrell said. “There was that freedom and self-confidence to just say, ‘Hey, John, this is what I’m seeing, and this [stuff] isn’t right.’ ”

With so many alums of the Hart-Shapiro-Antonetti Academy now working in Boston, it stands to reason the organization should operate in much the same fashion.